Unlike other mobile platforms, Apple iPhone has two known platforms, Cocoa Touch and WebKit Engine that iPhone developers can use to build their applications.

A native iPhone app is built on Cocoa Touch & a web app is built using pure JavaScript, HTML & CSS; which runs on WebKit Engine built into the iPhone. Web apps, are open & can easily be consumed by the user through the Safari for iPhone (by visiting the URL).

But there is another way that developers can make use of the WebKit engine. One can write their app in JavaScript, HTML & CSS and put it under the Cocoa Touch iPhone App Wrapper which will make it a native app, as if it’s built using Objective-C & can be released in AppStore. There are several tools which help you in doing this – PhoneGap is probably the most famous among them.
Since the release of iPhone SDK 4.0 (Beta) for the paid developers; there is change in User Agreement for iPhone SDK 3.1.3 / 3.2. You may refer to our previous post on this Apple Says No to Cross Compilers: iPhone Developers ok with it ?. But this concept of development is very much appreciated by developers because iPhone supports interpretation of JavaScript from it’s built in WebKit engine and often makes things easier. Apple has recently updated the Phone Gap guys that the they would not be effected by the change in section 3.1.3 / 3.2 and apps built on PhoneGap would be judged on their merit and not based on the framework.

Jesse Macfayden actually updated an old post with the following statement..

““I have received word from Apple that the above is STILL true! If you were concerned by the recent changes to Apple’s iPhone developer agreement, this has ZERO impact on PhoneGap!

Apps built with PhoneGap will continue to be reviewed based on their own merits and NOT dismissed/rejected because they use PhoneGap.

So enough with the crazy speculative rumour mill. Let’s get back to making apps with HTML+CSS+JavaScript.”

We found this pretty interesting that Apple would allow apps built through such tools when they have actually banned apps built in Adobe CS.  What do you think of this as an iPhone application developer? Have you ever used such a tool or do you plan to use them for your application development?

Tags: Adobe, Cocoa Touch, CSS, HTML, iPhone, JavaScript, news, Objective-C, PhoneGap, WebApp, WebKit